Biological and Molecular Imaging

Prof. Dr. med. Nasreddin D. Abolmaali Group Leader Nasreddin.Abolmaali[at]Oncoray.de

Our vision is the development and validation of clinical imaging techniques that visualize and enable quantification of biological processes of tumors in vivo. The major imaging modalities applied are PET, CT & MRI and their fusions. For PET, the main focus is hypoxia imaging with 18F-misonidazole (FMISO) in tumor patients suffering from head & neck cancer.

For CT, we mainly apply dynamic contrast enhanced CT (DCE-CT) to human xenograft models and patients with head & neck cancers, non small cell lung cancers and esophageal cancers. And for MRI, we are mainly interested in diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) that is done in 3D cell cultures with high cell density, in human xenograft models and in patients.

In several multimodality approaches we strive for fast translation of knowledge from 3D-cell cultures and in-vivo xenograft models to patient care. Our aim is to apply these new imaging techniques to patients that will receive radiotherapy to enable an optimized staging, an individualized therapy and a significant follow up.